Chef-include and test-kitchen

Chef Infra (archive)
1

Perhaps I’m handling this incorrectly, but I have a wrapper cookbook that includes a “role” cookbook using include_recipe. I’m using Berkshelf to manage the dependencies. The wrapper sets attributes for the specific node. I want to use test-kitchen to test this on my local machine and have added the wrapper cookbook to the kitchen yml runlist. When I run converge, I get

 WARN: MissingCookbookDependency:
   Recipe `xxx-client` is not in the run_list, and cookbook 'xxx-client'
   is not a dependency of any cookbook in the run_list.  To load this recipe,
   first add a dependency on cookbook 'xxx-client' in the cookbook you're
   including it from in that cookbook's metadata.

There is a depends statement in the wrapper cookbook’s metadata. Any idea what I’m doing wrong?

2

Assuming your .kitchen.yml is in the root of your wrapper cookbook and that cookbook’s metadata.rb has a depends on the cookbook with the xxx-client recipie. You want to make sure that you have a Berksfile in the root of your wrapper cookbook. If the dependent cookbook is in the supermarket, the default Berksfile should download it.

3

Ah, maybe that's my problem. The dependent cookbook (xxx-client) is a wrapper cookbook I've written, essentially a role cookbook wrapping supermarket cookbooks. My idea -- perhaps ill-advised -- was to have

  • inner cookbook wrapping various supermarket cookbooks into a "role" (in this case, sensu clients)
  • outer cookbook wrapping the inner cookbook, override attributes as needed for the particular node (in this case, sensu client for the San Fran area)

So, tl:dr: a custom cookbook wrapping a custom cookbook wrapping supermarket cookbooks.

4

Well you can absolutely customize your Berksfile to pull cookbooks from local disk. You just need to tell it where to grab them from. For example,

cookbook 'xxx-client', path: '../xxx-client'

Will pull in the xxx-client cookbook from the specified path relative to the Berksfile.

5

I double-checked, and I already have the outer cookbook’s Berksfile set up as you described, pointing to the on-disk location of the inner wrapper cookbook (xxx-client). I ran berks update to verify that Berkshelf was pulling in xxx-client correctly, and it worked as expected.

BUT!

While puttering around on disk using a terminal window, I discovered that my on-disk version of metadata.rb did not have the depends statement – as correctly reported by test-kitchen. Somehow my buffer in emacs showed it as having been written when, in fact, it hadn’t.

My bad. And sorry to have wasted your time. Thanks for the help.